Henry Ebel

Henry Ebel
psychohistory's enfant terrible

The point we keep forgetting about the prophets is that their audience really didn't want to hear those things.

Henry Ebel, 1978

In 1973, Henry Ebel, a literature professor at the City University of New York at the time, became one of the founders of the radical quarterly The Journal of Psychohistory. During the next fifteen years, Ebel used psychohistory, "the science of historical motivation" to explore many of our cultural tabus and most basic assumptions about ourselves. Writing in a journalistic, head-on literary style, he openly rebelled against the way academic research is itself often used as another defensive group-psychological device– in effect,as as a way to obscure rather than to understand the things that really matter in life.

Ebel quickly earned a cult status as the psychohistorical movement's own enfant terrible – the one who could be counted on to blurt out the sensitive things that no-one else would say out loud . Then, in 1987, he left, as hypercritical and dissatisfied as ever, deciding psychohistory too had now regressed into another self-perpetuating group-fantasy and had lost its original spirit of liberating exploration in the process.

In 2004, Henry Ebel's unique psychohistorical writings were at last made available in a three-volume anthology of essays, articles, aphorisms and personal notes – most of its material previously unreleased. Generous samples from these books are given on this website.

“Everything I’m saying is simple, even conservative, psychology!” Ebel protested against his critics in 1978 when the psychohistory controversy was at its peak. Like the proverbial boy in the fairy-tale The Emperor's New Clothes, he is only telling the truths that should be plain and obvious to everyone. And yet, the whole world conspires to deny them.

Henry Ebel expresses our most forbidden thoughts.

Editor Bernhard Grünewald

• Outrageous Statements – Henry Ebel's literary specialty par excellance.

New! • Intrusive Sexuality. Essential, unabashed and previously unreleased essay from the late 1970's found in Henry Ebel's personal archives in October 2004, after the release of the Henry Ebel anthology. This text throws the psychosexual roots of contemporary Western society in the face of its readers and has all of the elements of a classic Henry Ebel breathtaker.

New! • My Filthy German-Jewish Heritage. Autobiographical perspectives on the Jewish and German obsession-compulsion about cleanliness and dirt. Written in 1982, retrieved in 2005, previously unreleased.

The Henry Ebel Anthology:

Volume I:
Jews, Germans and Other Disasters

ISBN 91-974848-1-4

• Introduction by Bernhard Grünewald
• A Miracle of the Holocaust
• A German-Jewish Childhood in New York
• How Nations Use Each Other Psychologically
• Review essay: The Evolution of Childhood Reconsidered
• Games Nazis Used to Play
• Why the Nazi Leaders Were So “Jewish”
• Anti-Semitism and the Formation of the Israeli Personality
• Understanding the SS
• Getting Personal
• Conversations about Jewish Identity
• A Dialogue with the Prosecutor
• Being Jewish
• Lessons My Mother Taught Me
• A Psychohistory of the Jewish Liturgy
• True Confessions
• Repressing Nazism
• Breaking the Trance
• The German Neurosis
• Messianic States
• Mitteleuropa
• The Psychohistory of an Enduring National Identity
• Blood
• The Psychohistory of History
• The Past, the Present and the Future of Psychohistory
• Aphorisms

New! • How Could it Happen? "The strangest story ever told" – how rabbinic Judaism and Christianity appeared at the same time and place in human history, and developed into adversary and mutually dependent group-affiliations, ever since the first record of Jesus' teachings and right down into the Holocaust. This essential analysis of the bimillennial bond between Jews and Christians was retrieved in 2005 from the archives of the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, originally published in 1986.

Volume II:
Our Major Institutions Are Killing Us

ISBN 91-974848-2-2

• Review essay: The Damned
• The Media and the Fear of Death
• “Vietnam”
• Book Review: On the History of Sex
• “Mine”
• But What Kind of Baby Is Jimmy Carter?
• Our “Borders” Crumble as Our Borders Get Firmer
• Notes toward a Psychohistory of the Movies
• The Psychohistory of Money
• Why Prose no Longer Shakes Us Up
• The Psychohistory of War
• Why, You're in a Trance Right This Minute!
• Machine
• Five Thoughts on Art
• Collected Works
• On Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism
• Movie
• The Illegal Alien In the Museum Case
• The Decade-Cycle in Recent American History
• Walpurgisnacht
• Species Therapy
• Evolving Out of Our Mental Stone Age
• Aphorisms
• Poetry

Volume III:
Death and Birth

ISBN 91-974848-3-0

• The Simple Truth
• The Long Ascent to Paradise
• The Great, the Gigantic, the Overwhelming Metaphor
• The Unified Field Theory of the Human Condition
• Review Essay: Primal Therapy and Psychohistory
• Possession Phenomena
• The Challenge, if You will Forgive Me, of Mortality
• Why We Must Try to Think Less
• Getting Married
• The New Theology
• The Mind of Martin Luther
• How We Got This Way
• The Rebirth of a Soul
• Beyond Orality
• Looking Back on Psychohistory
• There Is a Purpose Behind This Demoralized Vaudeville
• Motivation
• The Struggle to Pleasure the Self
• A Versatile Artist
• Being Terrific
• Key to the Scriptures
• Aphorisms
• Poetry

Buy these books now!

Biography: Henry Ebel

Born in Nazi Germany on July 5, 1938, the oldest of two sons in a Jewish family that escaped to the United States in 1939. Grew up in New York City.

Studied at Columbia College and Columbia University, as well as in Cambridge, England. Ph.D in English literature 1965. Associate professor of English at the City University of New York 1969-76.

Worked for the psychohistorian Lloyd deMause's publishing house Atcom Inc. 1976-80. Ebel was the director of the “Today” professional newsletters and the editor of the weekly Behavior Today, for which he covered the New York psychotherapy scene during its most expansive and experimental years. Contributing to the development of psychohistorical thinking, Dr Ebel also published numerous essays, articles and aphorisms in American and West German periodicals between 1973 and 1987, including the Journal of Psychohistory, the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Kindheit and Psychologie Heute.

Adjunct professor of English, professor of Business Communications and other faculty positions at the University of Hartford and George Washington University 1981-2002.

Henry Ebel is the author of After Dionysus (1972), The First Part of the Revelations of Moses the Son of Jehoshar (1973), Odyssey Through the Dead Land (1973) Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy (with Lloyd deMause, 1977), Leaves From a Notebook in Progress (1978), The Workaholic Syndrome (with Judith Sprankle, 1987) and the present, three-volume anthology from Bias Bok: Jews, Germans and Other Disasters (2004), Our Major Institutions Are Killing Us (2004) and Death and Birth ( 2004) .

Henry Ebel is the father of two children, born in 1967 and 1976. He has now retired from public debate and lives with his third wife in Connecticut.

This site is produced by Bernhard Grünewald, a Swedish journalist who became Henry Ebel's publisher in 2004.

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